Explore "Alton Locke, Tailor and Poet" by Charles Kingsley on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
Have you done laughing! Then I will tell you how the thing came to pass.
My father had a brother, who had steadily risen in life, in proportion as my father fell. They had both begun life in a grocer's shop. My father saved enough to marry, when of middle age, a woman of his own years, and set up a little shop, where there were far too many such already, in the hope -- to him, as to the rest of the world, quite just and innocent -- of drawing away as much as possible of his neighbours' custom. He failed, died -- as so many small tradesmen do -- of bad debts and a broken heart, and left us beggars.